0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 3/37)

"Bach deserves to be called the miracle of Leipzig as far as music is concerned. For if it pleases him, he can by the use of his feet alone (while his fingers do either nothing or something else) achieve such an admirable, lively, and rapid concord of sounds on the church organ that others would seem unable to imitate with their fingers. He ran over the pedals as if his feet had wings, making the organ resound with a fullness of sound that penetrated the ears of those present like a thunderbolt. Frederick, Prince of Cassel admired him with such astonishment that he drew a precious ring from his finger and gave it to Bach as soon as the sounds had died away. If Bach earned such a gift for the agility of his feet, what, I ask, would the Prince have given him if he had called his hands into service as well?"

Unfortunately, many of Bach’s compositions that were preserved only in manuscript were lost in the years after his death. Nevertheless, the scholarly edition of his known surviving works fills almost 50 large volumes and a project to record them all in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1985 produced over 100 CDs. He made major contributions to every genre of the time except opera, and had he lived in a major cosmopolitan area with an opera house, he would undoubtedly have composed operas as well.

The duties and circumstances of the different positions Bach held largely dictated the focus of his compositional activity. Thus, many of his works for organ date from the periods when he was a church organist, those for instrumental ensemble from when he served Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen as director of chamber music, and his Lutheran church music from his 27 years as cantor and director of music of the four principal churches of Leipzig. The music for the Leipzig Sunday services, which began at 7 A.M. and lasted about three hours, included an organ prelude and postlude by Bach, often improvised, congregational singing of hymns selected by Bach, and a multi-movement cantata by Bach for soloists, choir, and instrumentalists on a text appropriate to that Sunday in the church calendar. In addition to providing music for church services and civic events, Bach’s responsibilities included the musical training of the town’s professional musicians, and daily instruction of the boys at the boarding school attached to the St. Thomas Church. Teaching was an important activity of Bach’s professional life and a number of his compositions were at least partly didactic. On the title of page of one of his important collections of keyboard music, the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach writes that he has composed the 24 preludes and fugues “For the Use and Profit of Musical Youth Desirous of Learning as well as for the Pastime of those Already Skilled in this Study.”

Bach’s thousands of surviving works are considered pinnacles of the art of polyphony, the musical texture consisting of the interweaving of two or more independent but simultaneous melodies. As described by a contemporary: